Illnesses & Conditions
Information on diseases and health concerns, including symptoms, treatment options, and prevention.

Coronary artery bypass surgery for coronary artery disease

Surgery Overview

During a coronary artery bypass, the diseased sections of your coronary arteries are bypassed with healthy artery or vein grafts to increase blood flow to the heart muscle tissue. This procedure is also called coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Bypass typically requires open-chest surgery.

There are several newer, less invasive techniques for bypass surgery that can be used instead of open-chest surgery in some cases. In some procedures, the heart is slowed with medicine but is still beating during the procedure. For these types of surgery, a heart-lung bypass machine is not needed. (For open-chest surgery, a heart-lung machine is needed to circulate the blood and to add oxygen to it.) Other techniques use keyhole procedures or minimally invasive procedures instead of open-chest surgery. Keyhole procedures use several smaller openings in the chest and may or may not require a heart-lung machine. These techniques are still being studied and may not be available in all medical centers.

The material in this section will focus on traditional open-chest bypass surgery. View the slideshow on CABG surgery to see what happens during a bypass.

In the past, the surgeon would remove a vein from elsewhere in the body (often from the leg) and attach it to the blocked artery or arteries in the heart. More recently, one or both mammary arteries, located on the inside of the chest wall—or a branch of one of the radial arteries, located in the arm, have been used to bypass the obstructed coronary vessel. These arteries tend to remain open longer than vein grafts.¹ In either case, blood is redirected through the artery or vein graft, bypassing the blocked or narrowed artery and increasing blood flow to a region of the heart.

© 1995-2009, Healthwise, Incorporated, P.O. Box 1989, Boise, ID 83701. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.